The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [371]
By the 1860s detective stories were becoming particularly fashionable in England, their first leading exponent being Wilkie Collins, notably in The Moonstone (1868) in which the detective is for the first time a policeman, Sergeant Cuff. His other best-known novel The Woman in White (1860) is also based on the Mystery plot, although it is not strictly a detective story.' Collins's friend Dickens used the plot in his last, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). In 1887 a young Scottish doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle, published A Study in Scarlet, introducing the most famous fictional detective of them all, Sherlock Holmes; and in the 60 Holmes stories he was to publish over the following decades he finally established the genre which in the twentieth century was to find countless practitioners, from Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and G. K. Chesterton to the Belgian writer Simenon and their American contemporaries such as Raymond Chandler.
As we see from The Woman in White, it is not only the more obvious type of detective story which can be based on the Mystery plot. It also, for instance, gives rise to a certain type of ghost story, where the mystery centres on tracking down the explanation for some ghostly apparition. But again this usually involves some past tragedy or crime, as in M. R. James's The Haunted Dolls' House (1925), written for the library of the Royal dolls' house. A collector buys a beautifullymade antique model of a country house, complete with a set of miniature human figures, and sets it up in his bedroom. He is awakened in the night by the chiming of a mysterious clock, and sees the dolls' house illuminated as if by moonlight. He then witnesses the unfolding of a ghostly drama, in which the figures in the house commit three murders. Amazed by this apparition, he tries to uncover some historical explanation for these strange events. Eventually he discovers the story of a long-demolished house, in which precisely such a baffling sequence of murders had taken place in the eighteenth century. But only now, two centuries later, have the true identities of the murderers come to light.
Citizen Kane: The Mystery as Tragedy
One well-known but very different type of story based on the Mystery plot was Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), The riddle is posed in the film's opening scene when, in a huge and fantastic Californian castle called Xanadu, we see the death of the fabulously rich Charles Foster Kane, owner of a vast newspaper and industrial empire. With his dying breath, he utters the single word `Rosebud'. A young journalist is so intrigued by this detail, which he senses may contain the clue to Kane's mysterious life, that he sets out to discover what `Rosebud' may have meant. The framework of the story is provided by the course of his investigation, but within this frame we see the journalist reconstructing Kane's entire life, from the day many years before when a stuffy, self-important lawyer had arrived in falling snow at the humble, remote log cabin where Charles lived as a little boy with his mother, to announce that the boy has been left an immense fortune. Young Charles is playing happily outside in the snow with his friends and is summoned inside, leaving behind his sledge, to be told that the lawyer is now his guardian and will be taking him off to begin a new life as the heir to millions. He is heartbroken to be torn away from his mother and his loving, simple home.
We then follow Kane's astonishing career as he grows up.